this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Should people also have the freedom of choice to buy snake oil that claims to cure cancer, etc? The opposite of freedom is not regulation. That's a bunch of propaganda used by people when they want to change an inconvenient topic. It's used, for example, when talking about the ACA and claiming that nationalized health insurance would rob the people of choosing their blood sucking middle man for health insurance.
Are you defending snake oil? The pseudoscience con so uniquituously used to deprive the desperate from their money that it became the term used to describe "harmful bullshit sold for profit?"
Freedom of choice or not, I suppose you should be able to spend your money however you want.
But if someone is selling people lies under the promise of medical miracles, we need to throw the book at them.
No.
Big fan of the Citizens United decision and money in politics, I take it?
Ah, I'm still waking up, so I must have misunderstood.
I hadn't considered political spending, but I didn't get the impression we were talking about super PACs. Those are abhorrent, and undemocratic.
My stance was that if a person wants to buy something that's stupid, ineffective, but gives them some small degree of hope and doesn't harm others, then they should be able to. However, I'm also of the opinion that regulators need to remove those products from the market because they're lying to people about their efficacy.
Ideally we'd be teaching people that snake oil doesn't work. But the current political climate suggests that Big Snake Oil has captured the regulation, so I don't see that happening either.
How is that even remotely equivalent comparison?